Waxman S R, Hall D G
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208-2710.
Child Dev. 1993 Aug;64(4):1224-41.
Recent research suggests that, although young children appreciate many different kinds of conceptual relations among objects, they focus specifically on taxonomic relations in the context of word learning. However, because the evidence for children's appreciation of this linkage between words and object categories has come primarily from children who have made substantial linguistic and conceptual advances, it offers limited information concerning the development of this linkage. In the experiments reported here, we employ a match-to-sample task to focus specifically on the development of an appreciation of the linkage between words (here, count nouns) and object categories in infants in the period just prior to and just subsequent to the naming explosion. The results demonstrate that, for 21-month-old infants, most of whom have recently entered the vocabulary explosion (Experiment 1), and for 16-month-old infants, most of whom have yet to commence the vocabulary explosion (Experiment 2), novel nouns focus attention on taxonomic relations among objects. This is important because it reveals a nascent appreciation of a linkage between words and object categories in infants who are at the very onset of language production. Results are interpreted within a developmental account of infants' emerging appreciation of a specific linkage between count nouns and object categories.
最近的研究表明，虽然幼儿能够理解物体之间多种不同类型的概念关系，但在词汇学习的情境中，他们特别关注分类关系。然而，由于儿童对词汇与物体类别之间这种联系的理解证据主要来自于在语言和概念方面取得显著进步的儿童，所以它对于这种联系的发展所提供的信息有限。在本文所报告的实验中，我们采用了一个样本匹配任务，专门关注婴儿在命名爆发之前和之后那段时间里，对词汇（这里指数名词）与物体类别之间联系的理解发展情况。结果表明，对于21个月大的婴儿（其中大多数最近进入了词汇爆发期，实验1）以及16个月大的婴儿（其中大多数尚未开始词汇爆发，实验2）而言，新名词会将注意力集中在物体之间的分类关系上。这很重要，因为它揭示了处于语言产生初期的婴儿对词汇与物体类别之间联系的初步理解。研究结果是在婴儿对可数名词与物体类别之间特定联系的逐渐理解的发展框架内进行解释的。
